What is Participatory Grantmaking

There
is a new buzzword in philanthropy and one which merits deep exploration.
Participatory grantmaking recognizes that grantmaking decision-makers may not
have the lived experience and proximity to the issues that they are working in.
It also recognizes that nonprofit staff are not merely beneficiaries of charity
but active change agents in the communities in which they live and work.
Participatory grantmaking seeks to be wildly inclusive and deeply engaging.

Beyond
empowering individuals, participatory grantmaking has a number of other
benefits. It increases transparency and accountability of large wealth-holding
institutions by opening them up to scrutiny and evaluation. This also
strengthens community trust of these formidable institutions that may have
previously been seen as top down, classist, and inaccessible. This type of
grantmaking allows for deeper understanding of issues and the block to block,
person to person, nuances that are often skimmed over in traditional
grantmaking.

Participatory
grantmaking practices can be incorporated into every step of the grantmaking
cycle – from research, to the invitation stage, to decision-making, and to self
and grantee evaluation. By engaging with on the ground individuals early on and
through the grantmaking cycle, foundations help cultivate a richer social and
safety network. It also encourages the diversification of opinions,
experiences, and backgrounds in a conversation which inevitably leads to
stronger decision-making.

Technology
and innovation lend themselves to the participatory trend, both in philanthropy
and beyond. Individuals can search online databases to see where a foundation
gives and how well paid their employees are. They can see how differently
family members are paid relative to non-family members in family-origin
foundations. Similarly, Gen Z is now the first digitally native generation that
has recently entered the workforce. They are accustomed to grassroots movements
driven by community calls for power like Occupy Wall Street and the Women’s
March. They also expect their opinions to be taken into account as demonstrated
by Yelp’s popularity and the Cancel Culture.

This
can be a challenging shift to many long-standing institutions where tradition
and power are tied together in a delicate but tightly woven web at the top.
Similarly, communities and grant recipients are often distrustful of efforts to
engage them. Time is often an inadequate resource for individuals, particularly
those near the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, and many may have found
theirs previously disrespected by fruitless evaluations, poorly directed site
visits, and unrewarded and onerous grant applications and character limits.

The
key to participatory grantmaking is to redistribute power and resources out of
the hands of the few and into the communities that are without. Increasingly,
philanthropic infrastructure organizations are building a cadre of resources
for institutions to help them meaningfully engage in participatory grantmaking.
A few of those resources include:

Our dynamic team has over 300 years of combined experience in both the non-profit and business sectors. The Starfish Impact approach creates a flexible team of experts that best suits the funding goals, operational targets, financial needs, and culture of the organization. Read more